John T


Anyone caught having fun will be ejected from the studio.

Actually, what is it about automation that makes it 'cheating'? 

It is almost like....how dare the machine take over....

Well if you let the ghost in the machine write the automation for you...

I think I disagree with the idea that "you leave your morals at the door". In the sense that I don't concede this is a moral issue.

Yeah, that moral thing is a stretch.

I thought it was the stretching thing that was moral. Now I'm confused.

Was it moral stretching or note stretching?

mmmmm...

John T


I don't think he's saying you can't EQ, just that you can't automate it. Why this is, I'm not sure.

Sigh.... Why do I bother? You guys are going to continue this nitpicky silliness forever, no matter what I say. ONCE AGAIN, if you have a killer take and there's one big fat note that's not working, then EQ it. If you suck, and you can't control your tone and you have automation of EQ all over the place, then don't put that out and pretend like you actually did that yourself.
 
There is NO equivalence between fixing a single note in a great performance, now matter how it's done, and doing large scale fixing up over the whole song, word level volume automation, lots of tuning and timing fixes, syllable level comping and so forth. If you are doing all those things, then just face it you aren't a good musician, so why you feel like you have to put out completely fake performances to pretend to be one is beyond me.
 
These are things that, in most other professions, would be considered just embarrassing. It's the steriods of the music industry. Almost everyone is taking them, but almost no one is admitting that they take them, leaving the people who want to make real music sounding like losers because they aren't data processed out the wazoo.
 
 

ONCE AGAIN, if you have a killer take and there's one big fat note that's not working, then EQ it. If you suck, and you can't control your tone and you have automation of EQ all over the place, then don't put that out and pretend like you actually did that yourself.

I wonder how many great artists and musicians that statement has just included. Most stuff released in the last 20 years I wouldn't mind betting.

I'm beginning to think I'm being wound up....

Most artists back before these times got the chance to record an album because they'd been putting in a lot of time on the road playing live. Yes of course there were always super-models who a record company wanted to try to make in a product, but most of them spent years in a live touring situation and then got noticed and got to make an album because they were a good or highly promsing band. Or, they were a new band made up of people who were previously in other known good or great bands, and therefore their skill was not in question. And, given the effort to do extensive fixups on tape, it was more efficient to just record it well to begin with, and that was the standard before the computer era, despite the cynicism that some might have about it.

These days, it's almost the opposite, with millions of virtual bands putting out music, the bulk of whom never play live, or play in a local bar band on the weekend or something. A lot of them probably (though the secretly wish it wasn't true) know they have zero chance so it doesn't even matter. They'll never have to face the embarrassment of trying to actually perform the highly faked up songs they put out anyway.
You really think that The Beatles or Pink Floyd or Rush can't put down great tracks without a lot of fakery? Or, for that matter, that someone like, say, Jewel or Joan Osborne or Alanis Morrisette, don't have monster pipes and can't bring it without cheating? Great artists are great because they can actually do it.